I am training a group of engineers and managers on planning R&D work. And I’m getting nowhere. A manager and his best lead engineer keep attacking every thing I say.  For every example, they have a counter example.  For every method, they are already doing it, only better and different.  They never really overrun projects.   Not if you take into account the fact that clients changed scope mid-project or management undersold it in the first place.

I’m at my wits end.  But then I see it.  I am up against “the” roadblock to change:

“That’s not how we do things around here!”

During a break, I asked the functional manager:  Why are you here?  “Management think we don’t know how to do our work”, he said.  “The CEO blames us for overrunning. But in fact, if it was not for us, they’d be doing worse.  We’ve been doing this work for 30 years, I think we know how by now”.

We resist change at various levels.  And we must address each level, or change won’t happen.  We might get short term improvement, – but it won’t stick.  We have to climb the Resistance to Change Pyramid.

Actions are the source of improvement, not people.

I remember a director at a contract R&D firm. He complained out loud and often about his staff. He had come from a big car manufacturer where apparently they could measure load curves for engines in a quarter of the time it took his current team to get them. Somehow this poor man had now ended up with a bunch of nitwits who could not do it right. Was he right? Do R&D firm hire nitwits?.

Well, he looked at measurable results – that was the good part.  Comparing the time it takes to get load curves told him that his current team needed to improve, and by how much. But it didn’t prove “nitwitness”.

The part he got wrong was that he kept looking at the people, judging them as if they were their results. But he never focused on what they actually did. To his mind there was little else to fix but the staff themselves.  And the results never improved.

People are not the source of improvement, their actions are.

A trivial distinction?